www.iht.com/articles/534474.html
WASHINGTON Ralph Nader's efforts to get his name on ballots in important swing states as an independent candidate for president are becoming mired in legal challenges and charges of fraud by Democrats who have mounted an extensive campaign to keep him from becoming a factor in this year's election. Several recent polls show that Nader could draw at least 2 or 3 percent of the vote in more than a dozen states where the race now appears close enough for him to alter the outcome, most likely to the detriment of Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, and in favor of President George W Bush. With reports that Republicans are bankrolling and gathering signatures for Nader in at least 10 states, local Democratic parties across the country, encouraged by an umbrella group called United Progressives for Victory, have initiated a series of efforts to stop him state by state. So far, with 77 days until the election, Nader seems almost assured of getting on the ballot in 11 states. He has filed petitions in more than 20 others and is awaiting rulings on their validity. But he is entangled in an assortment of lawsuits, including ones in states that may be the most contested in November. He is in court in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Arizona, and faces potential suits in Oregon, Iowa, New Hampshire, West Virginia and Nevada. He is also in court in states like Texas (for Bush) and Illinois (for Kerry) that are not expected to be battlegrounds. But the legal challenges there are diverting his time and resources. In Texas, Michigan, Illinois and Arizona, where he failed to gather the required number of signatures, Nader has challenged the requirements, contending that they were unfairly stringent and violated his right to free speech. Democrats have taken him to court in Pennsylvania, saying that more than 30,000 of the 47,000 signatures he filed on Aug. The national Democratic Party, while endorsing these efforts, has left it to United Progressives for Victory to organize and help finance the effort. We're doing everything we can to facilitate lawyers in over 20 states," said Toby Moffett, a Washington lobbyist and former Connecticut congressman, who is overseeing the group. He said that he was focused chiefly on finding election-law experts in each state who would work free, linking them with local Democrats and helping them share information in different states. Most of Nader's deadlines have come or are coming this month: the due dates for 23 states fall from Aug. In 2000, Nader won access to the ballot as a candidate of the Green Party in 43 states. Now as an independent, he has to fight his way on in most states. The rules vary from the minimal in Louisiana and Colorado, which require only that a candidate pay $500, to the more onerous, like Texas, which required 64,000 signatures as early as May 10. There is no other country in the world that has free elections that forces a candidate for chief executive to have to wrestle with 51 separate sets of laws, said Richard Winger, an expert on ballot access laws. Even the homeless, in Pennsylvania, have sued Nader, saying that he contracted with them to gather signatures but never paid them. Similarly in Oregon, the Service Employees International Union, which has endorsed Kerry, said that an initial examination of signatures filed there found that at least two-thirds were forged, had the wrong address or otherwise constituted what the union called overwhelming and systemic fraud." The fight has become fierce in Oregon, with anti-Nader forces going door to door and telling people who were circulating Nader petitions that they could be fined and sent to jail if they submitted fraudulent signatures. The Nader campaign said this was intimidation and had already caused 30 of its circulators to quit. It doesn't matter if it's a swing state or a safe state. The Democrats are doing their best to harass us everywhere. Their goal is to divert our resources and bleed our campaign. At the same time, challenges to the challenges are extremely difficult," said Dan Booker, a partner at the powerhouse law firm of Reed Smith, based in Pittsburgh, which helped build the case against Nader in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania effort is one of the most extensive and gives a glimpse into what it takes to mount such a challenge. The amount of time that has been devoted to this is easily in excess of 10,000 hours, Booker said. That includes the work of more than 100 volunteers in Pittsburgh for at least eight hours a day for a week, and 8 to 10 lawyers in his firm working at no charge for 80 hours a week for two weeks. The lawyers may end up working on the case for six more weeks before it is resolved. Working in conjunction with Reed Smith was a lawyer from Philadelphia, Gregory Harvey, a longtime elections specialist who has been detached from his firm while organizing and overseeing his own cadre of 70 volunteers at his end of the state. The state required Nader to submit 25,697 signatures by Aug. In Philadelphia, he also hired homeless people, offering them 75 cents per name up to 300 signatures, then $1 per name, Harvey said. Reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that they observed some of the circulators repeatedly signing one another's petitions and telling passersby that they could sign any name they wanted. Some of the homeless said they were not paid, and at one point, a melee broke out in Nader's Philadelphia office, shutting it down. The Democrats responded with the equivalent of a statewide bucket brigade: Officials in Harrisburg, under the auspices of H William DeWeese, the House minority leader, photocopied the 47,000 signatures and trucked them to the teams in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where volunteers began examining them line by line. In Pittsburgh, volunteers created a database of the 47,000 names. The firm converted its lobby into a war room where volunteers, organized by Lauren Lowenstein, the daughter of one firm partners, checked the names against the state's list of registered voters. Volunteers also called the homes of many of the signers to ask whether they had actually signed the petitions. In Philadelphia, Harvey sent volunteers to city computers where they compared the signatures. In one week, the two efforts produced a two-foot-high stack of pleadings showing what their court papers called a wide-ranging and extensive pattern of false and forged entries." Zeese acknowledged that some of the signatures had been forged but said those were not filed. Last week, the Commonwealth Court president judge ordered all parties to meet Thursday to set a date for hearings. He also said he would have at least five different judges throughout the state to hear the signature challenges.
|
http://csua.com/feed/